F E S T I V A L ／ FEST-088
Noboribetsu Jigoku Festival
登別地獄まつりのぼりべつじごくまつり
In the volcanic landscape of Noboribetsu Onsen in southwestern Hokkaidō — a thermal district whose most famous feature, Jigokudani (Hell Valley), is a sulfurous crater of boiling springs, steam vents, and mineral-stained rock that the local imagination has long associated with the Buddhist underworld — the town conducts its summer festival by staging the eruption of that underworld into the streets above. According to the Noboribetsu Tourism Association and Hokkaidō's official tourism materials, the festival's narrative conceit is that once a year the lid of Hell Valley's cauldron opens, releasing Emma-Ō (the King of Hell) and his retinue of oni (horned demons) into the human world. Floats built as mechanical effigies of Emma-Ō process through Gokuraku-dōri and the Izumigen Park area, accompanied by ranks of demons and performers beating taiko drums. The festival is transparently a modern tourism creation, assembled in its current form to capitalize on Jigokudani's pre-existing mythic identity — but that identity itself is genuine: the volcanic landscape has been called a jigoku (hell) since at least the Meiji Period, and the fear and awe it inspired in early settlers produced a folk religious register that the festival inhabits without irony. For the ethnographically attentive visitor, the festival is interesting precisely as a case of how pre-modern volcanic dread becomes encoded in contemporary festive form.
H I G H L I G H T S
Highlights
- 01The mechanical effigy float of Emma-Ō, King of Hell, processing through a sulfurous volcanic hot-spring district whose geological character has been described as jigoku since the Meiji Period — the landscape and its ceremonial representation are in genuine, if modern, correspondence.
- 02The oni procession and hell-drum performance (jigoku taiko) create a festive atmosphere rooted in Buddhist cosmology; the overlay of Edo-period hell iconography on a real volcanic environment produces a sensory and conceptual density unusual even in the context of Japan's summer festivals.
- 03Noboribetsu's Jigokudani is among Japan's most vividly named and visually striking volcanic landscapes; experiencing the onsen district as the setting of a hell-festival rather than a spa tourism destination reframes the environment's deep folk religious associations in an accessible contemporary form.
D E E P D I V E